Dan Boden provides his insight on teaching the whole Emergency Department. Some great ideas and some challenges for the future. How do you teach the whole department in your hospital? What works and what doesn't? Get in touch @the_emec or leave your comments below.

Hey thank you - a wonderful overview of a very well planned and executed educational approach.
A good mix of enthusiasm and expertise and discipline in there.

Couple of thoughts
- how do we avoid these excellent programs being 'siloed' ? We have a similar issue in our big department where med students, JMOs and trainees all have sufficient critical mass that their teaching runs separately - which helps targeting learning outcomes, but i think misses some of the team based connection across the groups.

- how to involve nurses?
We run 2 hours of our trainees protected teaching time each week with nursing in service time. The focus is 'practice improvement' ( which is what i think postgraduate learning should be largely about)
There are usually 4 presenters including nurses and we combine contribution of best practice/ evidence with audits of our practice and group based discussion on how to close the gap. Its far from perfect !, but i think a lot of prior worries about 'dumbing down' registrar teaching or overwhelming nurses have not come to pass, and its created a great momentum toward improving care as the ultimate target of our teaching.

Keen to hear others thoughts and experience, and thanks again

Reply

Dan Boden

15/6/2015 08:16:33 am

Hi Victoria,

Many thanks for your thoughts. You make a couple of really excellent suggestions/comments/questions.

On a similar theme to you, one of the things we are trying to do to help retain connection between the groups is for the Middle Grades to each undertake a designated teaching session for the nurse teaching. And, vice versa, for the nurses to teach the Middle Grades on areas of expertise where relevant.